Kevin Anderson - Lethal Exposure

As Craig approached the edge of the flames, he cut left, trying to find a thin patch of smoldering ground he could stomp through. The air smelled of thick pungent smoke, burning vegetation. Birds flew up from their hiding places, but the tearing-paper crackle of the blaze drowned out their squawking cries.

Jackson puffed up beside him. “Didn’t anybody ever tell you you’re not supposed to run into an oncoming flame front?” he said. “Head over to the pond. We can skirt the fire there and get past it.”

Craig saw what the other agent meant and took off, plowing through the grass, stumbling on insidious weeds, old lichen-covered branches, and rocks that protruded from the uneven ground. He swiped blades of grass out of the way like a safari explorer plunging through an uncharted jungle.

Black smoke filled the air. His quarry, Bretti, had fled far on the other side of the fire while he and Jackson struggled to continue their roundabout pursuit.

Soot and ashes and sparks flew around him, and the blaze swept toward them no matter how fast they ran.

Jackson pounded Craig on the shoulder to smother an ember that had settled on his suit jacket.

The downside to the other agent’s plan about getting to the holding pond was that the vegetation also grew thickest around the water’s edge. The two agents stumbled through the weeds with the flames hot on their heels.

The rippling wall of fire approached with a hissing roar. Craig turned to see they had no choice but to head into the pond itself. Without a pause, Jackson rammed into him, knocking him down the slope toward the muddy water. Craig maintained his balance in greenish-brown pond scum up to his knees, while Jackson, overexerted, stumbled, and sat down in the water.

Kicked onward by the increasing breeze, the fire struck the obstacle of the pond and curled around it, devouring the grass at the water’s edge. Frogs hiding in the shore weeds splashed into the pond, while indigenous birds took flight. Craig ducked and kept his face low to the water.

Finally, once the fire line had passed, Craig helped Jackson splash out of the pond. Dripping, they sprinted across the burned stubble, the ground still smoldering and charred beneath their soggy shoes. Thick with smoke, the air scraped Craig’s throat and lungs raw. His eyes burned, stinging from the heat and the soot, but he kept racing toward where he had last seen Bretti.

The grass fire had already consumed an amazing section of ground. Helicopters thrummed overhead, and emergency response teams finally arrived at the newly destroyed substation half a mile behind them. Ground fire crews rushed out across the flat ground to control the blaze, but it would take them a long time to get up to speed and pull their act together.

Craig was in close pursuit now. Bretti had to be near. He staggered into the smoke, unable to see, frequently losing his balance. Once, he barely caught himself from plunging face-first into the hot embers of a burned tree.

Just ahead, though, he spotted a dim figure moving through the murk. He yanked out his handgun and bellowed an ultimatum. “Bretti! Federal agents-give up now, sir!” Craig’s smoke-clogged throat made his voice hoarse, and his words came out as a raspy croak. The soot burned his throat and eyes and nose, which were still raw from breathing chlorine gas less than two days earlier.

The fleeing suspect, barely seen, did not respond. Instead, the figure moved closer, threatening. Craig blinked his burning eyes, desperately trying to get a positive ID. “Bretti, this is the FBI!”

“Craig!” Jackson shouted from the side, and then pointed, forcing him to take a closer look. “It’s not hunting season yet.”

Craig realized that the large form was one of the domesticated male bison, its hide singed. Lost and disoriented, the beast lumbered past, snorting, its huge round eyes red-rimmed. Frightened and aggressive, the bull thundered away from the flames, avoiding their noise.

“You have a lot of faith in your firearm, if you expect a weapon of that caliber to do anything more than piss off a buffalo.”

“It’s a Sig-Sauer,” Craig said, abashed, “a little more powerful than my old Beretta.” He continued running after the fleeing grad student. They dashed across the blackened ground until finally-covered with soot and drenched with both perspiration and stagnant pond water-they reached the end of the burn zone.

Craig bent over, placing hands on his shuddering knees as he squinted into the distance beyond the Fermilab boundary, toward the cluster of buildings in Batavia, the streets, parked cars… a wealth of places to hide. He removed his sunglasses, blinking in the light, straining to see ahead-but he saw no sign of their suspect.

Craig took a deep breath shaking his head. Sweat dripped into his eyes from his chestnut-brown hair. Once again, Nicholas Bretti had escaped.

Friday, 11:44 a.m.

Fox RiverMedicalCenter

On the last day of his life, Georg Dumenco’s exiled family members began to arrive-spectators at a premature wake. Paige led them in, hesitant but proud to perform one last service.

On his hospital bed, Dumenco looked hideous with his skin blistered, reddened, and sloughing off in wet flakes; it seemed a mercy for him to remain drugged, but the scientist rallied and fought, insisting on a last few hours of use out of his brilliant mind.

Upon learning that his prediction was correct after all, but that the antimatter was being bled off and thereby ruining the data from the detector apparatus, Dumenco sagged into stunned relief, as if prepared to die now that he had verified his precious theories.

The Ukrainian struggled to wakefulness and squinted at the new visitors in his hospital room, trying to see through the translucent curtain surrounding his bed. Paige thought Dumenco’s face bore a dreamlike expression, as if he couldn’t believe that his family had finally come to him, that this wasn’t just radiation-induced delirium.

Paige stood beside the visitors, trying to remain unobtrusive. This was their moment with their long-lost Georg. She had the flight schedules. The FBI had arranged for their tickets with the greatest expediency, rushing them from their hiding places across the mid-western United States.

Dumenco’s wife, Luba, his youngest daughter, Alyx, and his son, Peter, had come from Minneapolis, while his eldest daughter Kathryn ironically had just begun college at the University of Chicago. She lived close to her father, but was discouraged from seeing him… until now, when he lay on his deathbed.

Kathryn came forward in new blue jeans with her two hands clutched in front of her. Her straw-colored hair was cropped short, sticking out in a scarecrowish style that made her look like a waif. Her lower lip trembled. Her eyes were huge and shadowed as if she hadn’t gotten much sleep.

Paige’s heart went out to her, though she said nothing, just watching the tableau. Living in Chicago, young Kathryn had probably learned on the news that her father was dying and had spent days in anguish wondering whether she should break the secrecy, to put her entire family at risk by going to see her father one last time.

Luckily, Craig had taken care of that choice.

The wife also came forward to hold Alyx and Peter tightly, both of them shuddering as they stood beside the bed rails. Luba seemed afraid to approach the radiation-damaged wreck that had once been her husband. Georg Dumenco lay breathing raggedly through an oxygen mask, his eyes darting back and forth, sometimes with recognition, sometimes without.

Peter reached tentatively forward to touch his father’s hand, but then drew back, afraid he might cause further injury. The scientist looked so fragile, as if the soap bubble of his life could easily burst. Instead, the young man hunkered down, leaning against the visitor’s chair and began to whisper. Kathryn stood next to him, still biting her lower lip like a ghost.